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BIG PHYSICS, BIG QUESTIONS –

Real Bridge on the River Kwai

By Barry Fox

FIFTY years ago waves of Liberator bombers were deliberately destroying a remarkable feat of engineering. The prisoners of war who had been used as slaves to build two railway bridges deep in the jungle of Siam (now Thailand) welcomed the destruction, even though it meant they had to rebuild them again and again.

By May 1945 the British and American air forces had destroyed both bridges over the River Khwae-Noi (or Kwai as it is popularly known). The Japanese army’s vital supply line between Burma and Malaya had been cut, but by then the atomic bomb had made surrender inevitable.

In 1957 Hollywood made an epic movie about the infamous events in the jungle. The Bridge on the River Kwai won six Academy Awards. Doubtless the film will be shown once more on television, this time to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the war with Japan. But do not be tempted to believe what you see.

Of course the film-makers had to play down the appalling suffering of the POWs. It also does not matter that the film was shot in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. But it is hard to see why the producers also had to distort the historical facts.

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Thailand is now a holiday destination, and a stopover point for flights to Japan. It is quite easy to take a trip to the river and discover that the part of the film when commandos Jack Hawkins and William Holden parachute into the jungle and plant dynamite under the bridge, which British officer Alec Guinness and his surprisingly healthy-looking troops have built, is pure fiction.

The true story began when the Japanese marched into Singapore in February 1942. They needed to bring in supplies from Burma, but there was no railway through Siam. So Japanese Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo looked again at an idea dating back to the 19th century to build a railway through 420 kilometres of mountainous jungle. This plan had been abandoned many times – it was judged to be simply too difficult. Because there was no hope of getting machinery into the jungle, all the work would have to be done by hand. No government or private company had been prepared to do what Henry Flagler did when he drove his similarly unbuildable railway through the Florida Keys between 1904 and 1912 (Forum, 2 July 1994). Flagler just kept writing cheques for more manual workers. In Siam there was the added deterrent that too many workers would die from the diseases, like malaria, that are rife in a rainforest.

But by 1942 the situation had changed. The Japanese had a supply of cheap labour – Allied prisoners of war. In all they used 61 000 British, Dutch, Australian and American troops, of whom more than 16 000 died. The railway was 415 kilometres long&colon; 263 kilometres in Thailand and 152 kilometres in Burma. The two halves of the workforce worked towards each other, down from Burma and up from Thailand, meeting at the Three Pagodas Pass. On average four workers died for every 100 metres of track laid.

Japanese engineers said the line would take at least five years to finish, but the Japanese army forced it through in 16 months, completing it on Christmas Day 1943. The terrain was so bad that in Thailand alone the workers had to build 359 temporary wooden bridges for the railway.

At Kanchanaburi the chief abbot of the local temple established a war museum in 1977 called the Jeath War Museum, “because the word death sounded too horrific”. J stands for Japan, E for England, A for America and Australia, T for Thailand, and H for Holland. The museum is a bamboo hut, much like the huts seen in the movie, but with a collection of memorabilia inside. The hut is not an original – in the jungle climate nothing lasts that long. But former prisoners of war have visited it and have judged it a fair replica.

The first surprise is finding the hut lined with photographs of quite healthy prisoners, working in the sun and looking much like the actors in the Hollywood film. The Japanese did not object to local villagers, and even prisoners, taking snapshots in the early stages of the war. The work was then still light, and there had still been no epidemics of sickness. Prisoners could buy food from village traders and shops.

But as soon as prisoners started dying, photographs were forbidden. Trading became punishable by death. For a while the captives could still write notes and draw sketches. Later, they had to hide their pens and pencils by burying them.

The prisoners first constructed a large wooden bridge over the river, and this took its first train in February 1943. But the wooden bridge was only a temporary measure. The Japanese brought in large prefabricated metal spans from Indonesia for a permanent bridge. The prisoners had to build this all-metal monster without the help of cranes, like slaves building the pyramids. It was finished in May 1943.

The railway then pressed on through the jungle towards Burma, where conditions worsened. POWs began dying from the combined effects of malaria, cholera and malnutrition. Conditions reached their lowest point during the monsoon season of 1943. In late 1944 the US Air Force and British RAF started to bomb the lines and bridges to break the Japanese supply lines. The metal bridge was bombed at least ten times.

In 1946 the British army destroyed 40 kilometres of the line to block the connection with Burma. Later that year the Thai government Paid Britain £1.25 million for what remained of the line, and restored some of it. The jungle grew back over the rest. The bombed sections of the metal bridge were rebuilt and trains now run over it and upcountry. The old wooden carriages carry schoolchildren and farmers between villages. The wooden bridge was never repaired. All that remain are a few stumps sticking out of the water at either side, a hundred metres downstream.

Nearby the train runs over the Wang Po viaduct, a precarious collection of wooden stilts that looks like a ride in a Disney theme park. It still carries several trains a day, but every one looks likely to be its last.

Today, there are snack bars and tourist shops by the Kwai bridge. They stand on the site of the old POW camp. Tourists of all nationalities carry Japanese cameras and camcorders. Many stay overnight at the River Kwai Village Hotel, a luxurious jungle resort 70 kilometres from the metal bridge on the River Kwai. Every night as “entertainment” the hotel shows a video of the Hollywood movie that got it all so wrong.